Machine learning helps farmers fight global hunger

By 2050, Earth will have more people than existing farms can feed, but clearing more forests for farmland would be an environmental disaster. The solution is to increase the yield from land already in cultivation, and French startup DroTek is using IBM Watson Machine Learning to make that possible.

Machine Learning can uncover correlations among factors such as temperature, humidity, light, soil pH, precipitation and groundwater, then turn those insights into prescriptions for making every bit of farmland as productive as it can be.